Into the Waves

Drag City; 2012

Find it at:

"Way too many things happened last year, too much cake, too much wine," Sophia Knapp opines on "Glasses High", the opening cut from her solo debut, Into the Waves. Like most thinking adults, Knapp is preoccupied with the passage of time, with the proper ordering of a life: in a cottony whisper, she laments the way memories dissipate, how love wilts. "It's so hard to tell just how to make the good things last," she coos on the title track.

In the Brooklyn-based Cliffie Swan (a band still better known by its former name, Lights), Knapp's voice acted as a wispy counterpoint to her garage-guitar. Here, the instrumentation is almost self-consciously goofy-- the strings are tinny, the beats are pre-fab, and fade-outs prevent several of these tracks from ever having to actually resolve-- but Knapp's sweet and craggy vocals still manage to temper (and, in some cases, even justify) the goofiness of her backing tracks. The easiest analogue is Julee Cruise, who famously collaborated with David Lynch on the "Twin Peaks" soundtrack; Knapp's singing imparts a similar ghostliness, a sense of odd, unsettling discontinuity. The lush "Nothing to Lose", especially, feels like it was reverse-engineered to soundtrack a Lynchian moment: something absurd, something sinister, a high, breathy voice cutting through the darkness.

Mostly, though, the record's AM gold-aping sheen is the aural equivalent of smearing a camera lens with Vaseline: these are tracks for dreamily circling a roller rink in tiny shorts, or gently waving your bell-sleeved arms in the air (see Stevie Nicks circa 1976). The atmospherics are paramount, but periodically overwhelming, and when Knapp duets with labelmate Bill Callahan on two tracks-- "Spiderweb" and "Weeping Willow"-- his voice lands like a brick, leaden and heavy. It's a welcome presence-- an anchor in the fog-- and when Callahan ducks back out, you'll feel yourself craving his unmistakable corporeality.

Into the Waves is stylized, but its presentation still manages to suit its content. Mostly, Knapp is searching for a way to slow things down, to allow herself time to catch up: "Just a little, not a lot/ Just a little time/ is all we've got," she sings on "Close to Me", before the track blossoms into a kitschy, kicking disco jam. Knapp's is an awfully sympathetic predicament-- whether she dances it off or not.